What is mobile ad attribution? An introduction to app measurement

Mobile attribution is how marketers understand which marketing activity helped drive an install or engagement, and how users behave afterward. In simple terms, app attribution measurement connects a user’s ad engagement with the install or in-app activity that follows. This gives marketers a clearer view of what’s working across campaigns, channels, and creatives. 

In this guide, we’ll explain the basics of how mobile attribution works, why it matters, and what marketers need to keep in mind in today’s privacy-first ecosystem.

Before getting into how it works, it helps to understand why mobile attribution matters. Your users can come from many different channels, campaigns, and creatives. Without attribution, it’s much harder to understand which partners are driving installs, which campaigns are bringing in valuable users, and where you may be wasting budget.

An app attribution tool or mobile measurement partner (MMP) helps you understand where your users come from and how your marketing is performing. For example, you can see whether installs came from a paid social campaign on Instagram, a partner promotion, or from a static ad on the App Store. By determining your best-performing marketing campaigns, you can pinpoint the most effective ads and iterate on them. 

With information from attribution reports, you’re able to optimize your creative assets, and use hard data to get rid of failing ads while tweaking the good ones. Greater knowledge about how your ads perform allows you to practice smart retargeting and build segmentedad campaigns. Plus, you can see how a particular user’s journey compares to that of a user from a different user acquisition source.

To get the most value from attribution data, marketers typically work with an MMP such as Adjust. An MMP helps collect, match, and report the data you need to measure campaign performance and make better decisions.

Once an install is recorded, Adjust looks for eligible ad engagements that happened before that install. Only engagements that fall within the attribution window are considered. 

An attribution window is the amount of time between an ad engagement and the resulting install during which that engagement can receive credit. Attribution windows matter because users do not always install right away. Someone may see or click an ad, come back later, and then install the app. What’s more, during this gap a number of engagements with ads can take place, making the matching process critical for accurate attribution. In this case, the process is known as multi-touch attribution.

Adjust uses an attribution waterfall to decide which engagement gets attributed. It starts with the most reliable match available and then moves to other supported methods if needed.

1. Click-based deterministic attribution
   If there is an eligible ad click with a clear matching signal, such as a device identifier or store-based signal, that click gets priority. On iOS, the advertising ID is called an identifier for advertisers (IDFA). The Android equivalent is called a Google Advertising ID (GAID).
   • On Android, we’ll also check for a match via Play Store referrer, which contains a unique value our backend assigns to a specific click.
2. Click-based probabilistic attribution
   If a deterministic click match is not available, contextual signals from an eligible click, such as IP address, user agent, and timestamp, may be used to estimate the most likely match. The click that has the most common parameters with the install information will get the attribution.
3. Impression-based deterministic attribution
   If no eligible click-based match is found, Adjust can look for an eligible impression match using matching advertising IDs.
4. Impression-based probabilistic attribution
   If deterministic impression matching is not available, contextual signals from an eligible impression may be used to estimate the most likely match. The impression that has the most common parameters with the install information will get the attribution.
5. Organic attribution
   If no eligible click or impression match is found, the install is attributed as organic.

For example, a user sees an ad for a game on Facebook while commuting to work in the morning. They see another ad the next day on Instagram and click it. Later that same day, they download the app and play the game on their journey home.

In this example, the click engagement would be matched to the install, making Instagram the attributed channel. Meanwhile, Facebook may be considered an assisting channel.

iOS attribution now works within a more privacy-centric ecosystem. To access the IDFA for deterministic attribution, apps must request user consent through App Tracking Transparency (ATT). At the same time, marketers may also use Apple’s own measurement framework SKAdNetwork (SKAN) for aggregated iOS attribution and reporting. Since these sources report differently, marketers often look at them together to understand iOS performance more fully.

Marketers can use attribution reports to understand which campaigns drove installs and what users did afterward. Reports can be provided with either aggregated data in a dashboard, or as raw data that is supplied directly to your BI for more granular analysis.

Attribution reports can help answer questions such as:

• Which channels and campaigns drove installs?
• Which campaigns brought in the most valuable users?
• What happened after install, such as sessions, retention, or purchases?

In particular, analyzing post-install metrics can help you identify areas for improvement throughout your user journey and monetize your app strategically for the highest ROI.

Mobile attribution is powerful, but has many real challenges. Privacy changes, different platform rules, cross-device journeys, and fraud can all make measurement more difficult. That’s why marketers need a measurement partner like Adjust that can adapt to different attribution methods, support privacy-centric measurement, and bring reporting together in one place.

Those are the basics of mobile attribution. Now you know how attribution helps marketers understand what drives installs, how users behave after install, and where to focus budget for better results.  

To learn more about mobile attribution with Adjust and see first-hand how we can grow your app business, sign up for free or request a demo today.